Forward Deployed Engineer

Modern Relay is the source of truth for enterprise AI. As AI moves from chat to action, companies need a shared view of what's real, the governance to change it, and the infrastructure they control.

We've built a graph engine where humans and agents share one governed context. The ontology models every entity and relationship in the customer's domain. Git-like branching and merging let agents work in parallel under human review, with the query layer operating directly on the graph.

Every change to the graph is versioned, reviewed, and reversible, with all of it running on the customer's infrastructure. We believe this is the future of enterprise AI, and we're building it.

You might thrive at Modern Relay if you:

• Sit with a customer stakeholder in the morning and write production code the same afternoon
• Own a problem from discovery to handoff. Thin slices don't interest you.
• Translate messy organizational reality into typed schemas without losing what matters
• Have run a 30-day deployment before and know what week two actually feels like
• Enjoy the handoff as much as the build. Documentation, training, and the moment a customer runs it themselves.
• Already use Claude and Codex as your default tooling

Thirty days from discovery to handoff. You own every piece: the interviews, the ontology, the pipeline, the application, and the training.

• Run the 30-day playbook: days 1 to 7 discovery and system audit, 7 to 12 ontology design in .pg schema, 12 to 20 data pipelines, 20 to 25 .gq query library and UI, 25 to 30 handoff
• Map decision points across stakeholder interviews and draft the ontology a domain expert will recognize
• Build ETL from whatever customer systems are on the ground (regulatory, clinical, patent, LIMS, ERP, CRM), including the ones nobody wants to touch
• Ship the application layer: .gq queries, Claude chat integrations, dashboards, the interface that makes the knowledge useful this week
• Run the handoff: docs, training, the transition from you-running-it to them-running-it
• Feed every lesson back to Engineering and Product so the next deployment is 10 percent less work

• 5+ years full-stack engineering, ideally with time at a top consultancy or an enterprise software company that shipped real deployments
• Demonstrated ability to design ontologies for domains you didn't know a week ago
• Python and TypeScript fluency, working knowledge of Rust (or appetite to learn), command of SQL
• Customer-facing confidence: translating a 12-table schema into a three-slide board narrative
• Travel tolerance of 25 to 50 percent, depending on the deployment
• Security clearance or the ability to obtain one is a plus for defense-adjacent work

• Founder-tier equity
• Competitive cash, weighted toward equity
• Unlimited token access to Claude, Codex, and every AI tool to bring your wildest ideas to reality
• Small, flat team
• Build alongside the founders
• San Francisco or Barcelona, in person
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible time off

If this sounds like you, email careers@modernrelay.com with the subject line "Application: Forward Deployed Engineer". Attach a resume, point us at work you're proud of, and tell us what you'd build first.

We read every application. We write back within a week.